All this, in a flash through my brain, as I turned and followed my future Captain, my heart thumping a merry tune with the joy of this unexpected success, and a fierce determination to show myself fully capable of filling the post I was so tersely and unexpectedly offered.
The business at the shipping office was soon completed, and Captain Dang (as I learned was my new master’s name) told me to get my gear aboard that night, as we sailed in the morning.
When I got down aboard, Mr. Darley, the First Mate, was still pacing the poop. He watched me moodily as I was helping the cabby to get my chest aboard; then, seeming to have made up his mind to make the best of things, he came across and shook hands with me, and bellowed an order to a couple of the hands to come and get my stuff aboard and down to my cabin.
I gave the men a couple of bob, and then joined the Mate on the poop where he gave me a half-whimsical, half-rueful look up and down.
“I know how it seems to you, Mister Darley,” I said, laughing. “You feel I’m a kid, and you expect you’ll have two men’s work to do. I don’t blame you. Only, you know, somehow I think you’ll not find me as bad as you think. You see, I’ve done one ’Frisco trip as acting Third; and all the way home the Second was laid up, and I had to take his watch.”
“Oh!” said the gaunt Mate, evidently greatly relieved. “I guess you’re all right, Mister. We’ll do fine; an’ th’ Old Man’s a good sort, right down to th’ keelson, an’ no mistake. Shake!”
And therewith we shook and became very sound friends indeed.
The next morning, a little after six o’clock, the tug took us in charge, and we began our trip down the river. There’s one thing I do like about sailing from London; the river trip gives one time to get settled a bit before getting out into broken water. But if you sail from Liverpool or any of those sea-board ports, you’re right out in the smother before you know where you are, and everything adrift, and a regular bunch o’ buffers if there’s any sea on.
The Mate took her out; and I never so much as saw the Captain until evening, after the tug had cast us off, and we were bowling down Channel under all sail, with a splendid fair wind. The Mate had just sung out for all hands to muster aft to pick the watches, and I was leaning over the rail, across the break of the poop, looking up at the drawing canvas.
“There’s poetry in canvas, laddie, when the wind gets into it,” said a half-familiar voice in my ear.
I turned my head quickly and looked at the speaker. I saw a short, stout-seeming, enormously broad, unshaven man, dressed in heavy, blue pilot-cloth, with a peak-hat pushed well back on his head. I give you my word, I never recognized who it was for quite half a minute; but just stared stupidly, with a feeling that was only part uncanny oppressing me. Then, suddenly, I knew—
“Captain Dang!” I said with something that approached a gasp. “Captain Dang!”
“The same, laddie. The very same,” he replied, his face widening grotesquely in a smile of enormous good humour.
I never saw such a change in a man. His very voice was different. It had lost it’s note of culture and its crispness. It sounded deeper, more mellow, slacker—if I might so describe it. His shoulders were rounded; his face had broadened, and might never have looked stern. His walk had lost its swift precision and had given place to a careless roll that yet had a cat-like note of quickness in it.
I had stepped back a little from him, and was staring, like the bewildered lad that I was. Then I saw his eyes, and felt I recognized him fully once more—they were the same steadfast, grey, understanding eyes that had looked at me so inscrutably the previous day.
“It is Captain Dang!” I said aloud, involuntarily.
The burly, rounded shoulders heaved, and the face hid itself once more in a vast smile; the mouth opened and bellowed laughter.
“The very same, laddie; the very same,” it succeeded in explaining in a husky whisper, as the laughter died away. He fumbled for and produced an enormous red handkerchief, with which he mopped his somewhat red face. I saw then that his hands were encased in the very smartest, lavender kid gloves. Picture the man—broad, roughly clothed, unshaved, full of gorgeous laughter, wearing long gum-boots up to his thighs, a great chew of plug tobacco in his mouth; homely, almost to roughness of speech, and wearing smart kid gloves.
Do you wonder that I stared afresh.
And Captain Dang, for his part, just leaned back against the harness-cask and roared afresh. Then, suddenly, he bent towards me.
“You’ll be pickin’ your watch, laddie, in a moment; be sure to pick Turrill, that lanky, daft lookin’ devil for our side. I want him in our watch.”
“Very good, Sir,” I replied. “I know the man you mean. He’s a good sailorman, I fancy, too.”
“Maybe, laddie. Maybe,” said Captain Dang, and he turned and walked aft, chaunting in a deep voice, not a song of a Chauntey; but what I recognized later to be Mendelssohn’s “But the Lord is Mindful”—a thing which I found he was always bumming and humming, as he paced the poop.
I stepped back again to the break of the poop, and looked down to where the Mate was sitting on the hatch, waiting whilst the men mustered aft. He saw me and glanced up and grinned, as if something tickled his fancy; then took his pipe slowly from his mouth:
“Come along down, Mister,” he said, beckoning with the pipe to the assembling men. “We’ll get this job done, an’ then settle the watches for the night.” As I reached him, he stood up from the hatch, and leaned towards me:
“You’ve met th’ Old Man at sea now,” he said. “Almighty strange card, ain’t he? A downright good sort, Mister; but don’t you make any bloomin’ error; he’s a devil when he wants to be.”
“I believe you,” I said frankly. “He makes me feel as if he were my own father; and yet I’m hanged if I know whether he’s good or bad. I don’t know whether I like him or funk him. But I think I do like him.”
“I know,” agreed the Mate. “But you’ll find he’s all right; only he’s up to any damned devilment that hits him. I’ll give you one tip, though, Mister; never say a word again’ wimmin where he can hear you, or he’ll plug you sure as fate. No good your argying; you’re a strong lad, I can see; but he’s as strong again as you. You be told in time. Now then, Mister, we pick our watches an’ be damned to ’em!”
Which we did, I securing the lanky, leathery-looking, daft-faced seaman Turrill as my first choice, with the result that his somewhat expressionless eyes lit up for a moment with surprised pleasure.
For a few days at this, I saw very little of Captain Dang, that is to say, intimately. He kept to his cabin a good deal in the day time, and from a glance or two I had through the open doorway, I saw that he was busy with some chart-work. At night, however, he would come up on deck about four bells (ten o’clock), and pace noiselessly but swiftly up and down for maybe an hour, bumming away eternally at his favourite selection from Mendelssohn. Then, quite suddenly, as though an idea had come to him, he would make a bolt for the companionway, and down out of sight, without a word, and I would, like as not, never see him again that watch.
A night or two later, however, we had a long talk, and he took me into his confidence in the following way. I had been down on the main-deck, slacking off the braces, a little after five bells. When I finally returned to the poop, I found the Old Man pacing fore and aft, to windard, bumming away as usual at his classical selections.
For my part, as it seemed to me that he wished to be alone, I walked thwart ship, to and fro across the poop break, arranging my journeys so as not to meet the Captain, as he came forrard. Suddenly, however, he left his regular beat and came across to me, where I had paused a moment, staring away to leeward.
“Laddie,” he said, speaking in a quieter voice than usual, “I want you to take the wheel from yon Turrill, and send him forrard to me. I want a word with him without the crowd knowing. Away with you now, smart, laddie. I’ve a yarn for you later, maybe.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” I said
and went away aft to relieve the A.B., telling him the Skipper wanted a word with him, which news the man received without comment, and walked forrard to the break.
For some time they stood and talked, a little foreside of the jigger-mast; then Captain Dang took the man below into his cabin, and for quite half an hour the low murmur of their voices came up to me, mingled with the odd, faint sounds of papers rustled, by which I surmised that the Captain was handling an unmounted track-chart, and tracing out something that had to do with their talk.
Now, what I have recorded is not exactly orthodox. It is not usual for the Master of a vessel to indicate to his officer that any particular A.B. shall be placed in any particular watch; it is still less usual for a ship-master to follow up such an action by inviting the A.B. down into his cabin, to some conference connected, presumably, with chart-work of any form or description. All this was, obviously, intruding itself upon me. I could neither fathom it, nor yet push it out of my thoughts. I found myself conjuring up a wild romance of mystery, for which I called myself a fool immediately. Yet, as it chanced, nothing that had flashed through my puzzling brain, was half so extraordinary as the actual strangeness towards which we were heading; as I think you will acknowledge, eventually.
Seven bells struck forrard, and I answered them with the bell on the wheel-box; for I had told the ’prentice who was time-keeping that he could go down for a smoke. The ring of the bell had hardly died away, before Captain Dang emerged from the companionway, followed by Turrill, who came immediately to relieve me at the wheel. As soon as I had given him the course, the Old Man told me to light up and come for a turn along the poop, as he wanted to have a talk.
“Laddie,” he said, after we had done the distance fore and aft a couple of times, “yon Turrill’s the devil of a lad.”
He stopped and fumbled for his matches, and I found myself nibbling mentally at the fact that he spoke with something of a Scotch tang. Yet there had been no suggestion of any kind of tang in the speech of the well-dressed man I had applied to for a billet only a few days before. However, I had almost ceased to wonder at any new side to his character that my Captain chose to turn up.
He lit his pipe methodically and walked slowly to leeward to dump the burnt-out match into the sea. There he stood for some minutes, as if he had entirely forgotten me and the thing he had meant to talk about. Abruptly, he turned and beckoned to me through the gloom to join him, which I did.
“Hark to it, laddie,” he said and bent now over the lee rail, staring down into the sea. “Hark to it.”
I bent also, in doubt as to what he meant; but all that I could hear was the strange, keening hiss of the foam to leeward, as the ship drove easily along with the light breeze upon our beam.
“Yon’s the sea an’ the ship talkin’, laddie,” he said at last, showing me again that half-poet side that he had uncovered in that former remark, days before, when I was looking up at the canvas.
I made no reply, being young; and indeed there was nothing I could say. Once Captain Dang spoke: “And the wind, laddie! And the wind, laddie! Hark to it talkin’!” he said.
I heard it then, though I had not noticed it before—the low musical booming of the wind emptying itself out of the lee of the cross-jack. And, listening, you know, I began dimly to appreciate. But I was, as I have said, something young as yet.
Captain Dang returned to wind’ard, and we resumed our traipse fore and aft.
“Yon Turrill was in a whalin’ packet, laddie,” he said abruptly. “She foundered, so he says, in a little bit of the Pacific Ocean that I happen to be uncommon well acquainted with. Ran on to a spike of rock and went down in two minutes, more or less. That’s the beginning of it, laddie; an’ there’s no such rock marked in any chart of those seas, as well I know; though, mind you, it’s an uncommon lonesome patch he’d got into. There’s a few hundred miles that way, laddie, North an’ South, East an’ West, that’s precious little known, even to the whale-ships; an’ they go mostly everywhere, an’ to the devil in the end, like the rest of us.
“That’s, as I was saying, laddie, only the beginnings. Yon Turrill got away in one of the boats with the Mate and three of the hands. They were, I should say, uncommon lucky; for it was all so sudden that there was only two other boats got afloat, and a rare throat-cuttin’ to get into ’em, with the result they was both capsized, and the contents went to D.J., which is short for Davy Jones.”
He stopped and chuckled at me through the darkness; and in the pause that followed, I found myself puzzling, almost half irritably why he did these things—why he talked like that; why—oh, a hundred things! It was the irritation and puzzlement of Youth that cannot put one of its limited supply of labels on some newly found object; and is therefore troubled.
“As I was sayin’, laddie, for the third time isn’t it? all this was only the first lap, as you might say. Presently, after a little spell of something like fourteen days in the boat—five of ’em without grub or drink—they drifted in sight of a great big lagoon; mind you that, laddie—a thunderin’ big one; no five-shilling-piece reef; but a good fifteen miles long, so the man says, an’ always has said, even in the papers, way back. You may remember reading something about it?”
“No, Sir,” I said. “I never read the papers.”
“Well you should, laddie,” he replied. “If I didn’t read ’em, I should never have come across this. It was that way I found out Turrill and signed him on. We’re out for something this trip, I’m hoping; an’ maybe we shall be a bit overdue—from the freighters’ point o’ view; dam ’em; the Lord help ’em!
“Well, as I was saying, they discovered this big lagoon, away down on the horizon; and that put some spunk into them; an’ they out oars and pulled for it until they came to one of the openings and put the boat in through, with a great deal of misdirected energy in the shape of Thanksgiving; so I gathered from Turrill.”
He paused again to chuckle; and I smiled to myself, to notice how the wording of the last part of his yarn had betrayed the man of culture, with its accompanying touch of cynicism, peeping out unwittingly through the rind of rough, pilot-clad sailorman.
“Now, laddie,” he continued, after an almost imperceptible little pause of silence following his laugh, and with something in his voice and words that stirred me to a sense of coming adventure and mystery: “there’s no such lagoon marked on any chart of that part of the great big Pacific Ocean. Moreover, and what is more, I’ve never run against it; and, as I’ve hinted already, I happen to know that patch pretty well; for I’ve done some hanky-panky down there that would prove interestin’ telling, laddie. Yet, mind you, it’s an almighty big patch, as I do admit; an’ a ship or two, or an island, for that matter, might be lost there for an odd century or so without much trouble.
“Now they found three islands in the lagoon, laddie, and an old-time wooden, ’Merican sailing-ship. Think of it! An’ these five blessed shipwrecked mariners, of course, away for the ship an’ hailed her; but never no answer.” He chuckled inaudibly. “So they up an’ hailed her again; but still no answer; then the Mate an’ Turrill shinned up the cable (chain it was, so the miracle wasn’t complete, laddie!) and got aboard. There was no one in that vessel, fore or aft; and Turrill says she had a queer, desolate sort of feel to her. Yet she wasn’t rotted, an’ her paint-work was good, as I made him remember. What do ye think o’ that, laddie? But there was no water in her—leastways, the two of ’em couldn’t find the water bar’l.” Again Captain Dang chuckled silently to himself as he discovered himself overdoing his language. At least that is what I supposed; though I don’t know whether he had discovered the infusion of Americanism that was now in evidence. He paused for quite a minute; so that I prompted him; for I was impatient to hear more:
“Yes, Sir,” I said.
“So they went down again into the boat, My Son,” said Captain Dang in his queer, whimsical fashion. “And they went ashore then on the middle island, which was the nearest, and in a biggish
hurry, I fancy, having something of a thirst on ’em; though weakish, you know. Bound to have been—hey?”
I began to perceive that Captain Dang was quite prepared to find Turrill’s story all moonshine. His manner told me so much; yet he was plainly not entirely of this mind.
“They found some bananas ashore,” continued Captain Dang, knocking out his pipe. “That should tell you something about the climate, sonny. Also, there was plenty of water. They filled the boat’s breaker, took some big bunches of the fruit, and went back to the old ship. What did they do that for when they had a chance to have a run ashore!
“They slept aboard that night, the whole five of them in the big poop-cabin. And this is where the yarn comes a bit thicker than ever. Turrill says he woke up sometime in the night with a feeling that something was wrong. There was a good moon shining, and he lay still and took a careful look round the big cabin; but the men were snoring away in their bunks, and everything just quiet and ordinary. Yet, all the same, yon man says he felt there was something queer about. He’s daft lookin’ enough, anyway! He lay still as a mouse, just harking for all he was worth. Then he thought he heard a faint, wee sound on deck, and the next moment there came something up against the window that looked over his bunk. He swears it was the most lovely lookin’ face ever he’d seen, but it gave him the horrors, worse than if it had been a tiger lookin’ at him.
“An’ then, so it seems, the thing went away from the port, or window, as I should say, and the next instant it came back, laddie, an’ looked at him again. But now it was a huge, great face, like a monstrous great hag’s. An’ the thing just looked at him, so he has it, and looked at him until he woke up and found that it was morning, and the sun shining in through the window on his face, and he pretty sure then that it must have been a dream—only it seems he was to know different in a bit.
“They went ashore in the morning onto the middle island for some more fruit, and to see whether they couldn’t put their hands on something better to get their teeth into. An’ well I know the feelin’, laddie! One of the men stayed aboard an’ said he’d have another root round in the ship to see whether there weren’t nothin’ fit to eat somewheres.
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions Page 32